Tag Archives: AWS

I wouldn’t think so and wouldn’t know how they could incorporate the two. Azure is Microsoft hosted and SPLA is partnered. Microsoft will want to keep SPLA and Azure separate.

Is Azure Stack part of SPLA?

Azure Stack by itself is not part of SPLA. What’s part of SPLA is the Windows licenses. As a service provider, you could deploy Azure Stack, pay the base consumption rate, and use Windows licensing with SPLA. In fact, I think it’s less expensive to do it this way.

If my customer wants to use their own Windows license on Azure Stack, do they also require CAL’s?

Yes. You need to pay attention to the Product Terms to ensure compliance. As an example, volume licensing prohibits hosting. You cannot install your own Windows licenses through volume licensing and host using Azure Stack.

Does Office 365 qualify for the SAL for SA product in SPLA?

The only Office 365 product that is eligible for SAL for SA is Skype.

Is SPLA pricing going up?

Yes and will not be decreasing anytime soon.

Since AWS offers dedicated hardware, could I transfer my customer’s license to their datacenter without Software Assurance?

Yes. If its dedicated hardware Software Assurance is not required.

What about Azure?

No, you would need Software Assurance.

Will Microsoft finally allow MSDN to be licensed in my datacenter?

Probably not. Although if you use Azure, MSDN is eligible to be transferred.

If I sell CSP through 2-Tier distributor, can I sign the QMTH addendum?

No. You must be CSP 1 – Tier to qualify for QMTH.

Can I outsource support for certain software through CSP?

Yes. You an resell the solutions you can support and leverage another partner for support for other products.

Here’s the latest news of the month for all MSP’s and SPLA providers. Enjoy!

SQL 2017

This month is a month we will remember for the rest of our lives. That’s right, today SQL 2017 is available to run on…a non-Microsoft system?

From the licensing guide: “SQL Server 2017 now supports deployment on RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). The SQL Server 2017 SKUs are platform agnostic, so customers can run the software on either Windows or Linux.” (check it out here)

What this means for those anti-Microsoft lovers is a customer who demands SQL can now install SQL 2017 on a Linux machine and not report Windows. The machine cannot run any Windows guest VM’s for it not to be reported. Pay attention to that last sentence as we get asked a lot about licensing individual VM’s instead of the actual host. In Windows licensing, you license the physical host, not the VM’s. If there are 100 Linux VM’s and only 1 Windows VM, you must license the host with Windows Datacenter to be in compliant.

Azure Stack Availability

The long await is over – Azure Stack is now shipping through the OEM channel (Dell, Lenovo, HPE) You can read more about this announce here From a licensing perspective, I think it is less expensive to license Windows through SPLA than pay as you use model. It’s more of a predictable cost in my opinion. This is one way Microsoft is attempting to extend Azure (public cloud) into your private cloud and have the best of both worlds.

“Hit Refresh”

Satya Nadella “Hit Refresh” book is available at a time when we are all in a strange way, hitting refresh. The cloud transformation is only getting more complex – hybrid, dedicated, Google, AWS, Azure, every company is transforming to try and get the slightest edge over their competitors. I look forward to reading it and every dollar goes to Microsoft charities. Regardless of what you think of Microsoft, Satya seems like one of the good guys. You can check out more about the book here

If a customer has 4 x SQL Server Standard (8 cores), does that mean I will also need to have 4 x SQL-SAL?

There’s no server + CAL model in SPLA. You license either per core or per user depending on the product. Remember, SAL is not licensed per server, but for each user that has access to that server. Your question indicates you might believe a SAL is licensed per server which is not true.

2. Is MSDN available through SPLA? Is it through Azure?

MSDN is not available in SPLA, but you can license the individual components through SPLA. If an end-user would like to bring their MSDN license over to your datacenter, you must dedicate the solution for your customer. Yes, Amazon must play by the same rules. Oddly enough, Azure (which is shared) does allow MSDN to be transferred over to their datacenter.

3. I received an audit notification. Should I respond?

Yes. But don’t work on their time, work on yours.

4. If I signed the SCA addendum, do I need to sign the new QMTH addendum?

Unless you are planning on hosting Windows 10 you do not need to sign the new addendum.

There’s been a lot of talk as of late about the new QMTH addendum. I’ve written a couple of articles on the topic here In this article, we will summarize what is written in the addendum so there’s no surprises. I listed some (not all) of terms and conditions to ensure you are up to speed on the latest developments.

CSP Membership – You (or affiliates) must be a Direct CSP partner. This means you cannot leverage an Indirect CSP partner for this program. In other words, if you receive CSP licensing from Ingram Micro or SherWeb (as an example) your partnership with those distributors/partner does not qualify for QMTH. Your organization must be CSP Direct authorized, not your partner.

Must meet the system requirements – System Requirements can be found here

Have an active SPLA agreement.

Reporting Requirements – You will always need to report underlying licenses in SPLA. Those underlying licenses could be any software to deploy a VDI solution – (Windows Server and RDS). In addition, you must report (by the last calendar day of each month) the Windows 10/O365 licenses deployed. This is manual, meaning you will send an email to the QMTH alias for submission. Once automated reporting is available, you must enable Microsoft’s automated reporting tool. Microsoft will use the tool to collect your customer’s organization ID and tenant ID as well as the total number of users accessing the software.

As the provider, you must report to your SPLA Reseller the program administrative fee. If you are currently in the SCA program, you will be familiar with this SKU.

As the provider, you must make all education materials publicly available. You cannot just sign up for CSP, the education material should be like what’s on the QMH website.

For each per user subscription to Windows 10 Enterprise, the end-user can only access up to four (4) instances of Windows 10 either on Azure or you, the QMTH hoster. This is like the SCA program in which the end user has five (5) instances of Office Pro Plus, Windows 10 works the same way.

Listed above is a summary. I encourage you to reach out to your Microsoft rep for additional information. I am happy to review it further, it’s a new program with pluses and minuses. Be sure to understand the minuses first 🙂

As we enter the new FY at Microsoft, I thought I would put together a list of topics that’s on everyone’s mind.

SPLA going away? I don’t think so. There’s too many SPLA partners to make an entire program disappear. I also think this is one of the benefits Microsoft has over all it’s competitors. If a customer wants to have an application hosted in one datacenter and use Azure for disaster recovery – Microsoft wins. If Amazon is running Windows workloads (which they are) they must pay Microsoft for that usage through SPLA. I also think SPLA is a way to move customers to Azure. If you are a SPLA customer who just went through an audit, the SPLA customer might ask themselves why they continue to host at all? Let’s use Azure and my compliance problems go away. (they don’t but that’s for another article).

Is CSP/QMH really a must? I guess the jury is still out (it hasn’t even launched yet for the partner community – September 2017). There are a lot of restrictions to this program to consider – underlying Windows Pro licenses, becoming CSP direct authorized, not using CSP Indirect, RDS licenses when deploying VDI, etc. If you decide to go down this route, pay close attention to what you can and cannot do.

Will SPLA pricing increase? Yes. No doubt about it. Nothing stays the same for too long.

How can AWS win the cloud war? Amazon has a revenue first, profit second mentality in my opinion. Just look at their last earnings report (2017). They can buy their way into the SaaS market at any cost. They are not just a cloud company, they are an everything company. They have the leverage to really get creative with their marketing and win businesses over.

How can Google beat AWS and Microsoft? Google hasn’t scratched the surface with their footprint in the enterprise space. One slip up by the other cloud powerhouses and Google becomes a very attractive offering. Google has the power, the money, and the brand to make headway. Like AWS, they are not just a cloud/software company, they are an everything company. I really think Google will surprise a lot of analyst in the near future with their cloud growth.

How can Microsoft beat them all? Any organization that uses Microsoft software in a hosted environment must pay Microsoft for that luxury. They already have a large footprint and very large customer base to move to Azure. They also have 30k + SPLA partners (estimate) that are being used to sell their solution.

Will SPLA Man be able to afford a nice piece of jewelry for Mrs. SPLA Man? For all the single women who read SPLAlicensing.com, don’t make the same mistake Mrs. SPLA Man made. Poor Mrs. SPLA Man, when I first met her at the bar, she thought SPLA was something I created for the space station. Space Program Living Association. S.P.L.A. – kind of like a home owner’s association but for space. (I am not sure where she got that idea). I do have a cool blog??!

Microsoft reported earnings last night that surpassed expectations and gave us insight into their cloud business. I am not a stock analysts, but I thought I would spend some time reviewing some of the highlights and my opinion for what’s next for the software (I mean cloud, actually, no -I meant Intelligent Cloud) giant.

Azure – Microsoft did not provide specific revenue numbers for Azure, but did say revenue grew 97% y/y. Although exact numbers for Azure revenue is not specified, Azure is part of the all-important commercial space, which includes Dynamics 365, Azure, and a little program called Office 365. That revenue number combined was over 18B which more than doubled last year’s number.

Office/Dynamics and Competition – Office 365 subscription business just surpassed the traditional Office model with revenue up 43%. When was the last time you went to a box retailer and purchased software? That’s a telling sign that more and more organizations prefer subscription pricing over box products. Dynamics 365 was up 74%, probably because Dynamics in SPLA is about as complex as it can possibly get. Need help with a Dynamics licensing question? Ask your reseller. The reseller will ask Microsoft – and then it goes into a big, dark, black hole until someone loses their mind. Nothing happens. Microsoft also revamped Dynamics in SPLA to make it very difficult to compete. The same can be said for Office. Where I see concern for Microsoft is with Google, who is just getting their foot in the door in the enterprise space. If they make traction (and they will) it will be interesting to see the two giants go at it. Google’s cloud platform is growing exponentially as well.

Surface Sales – I guess you can say is one of the low points of the conference call. Surface revenue dropped 2%. Xbox sales also dropped and became less profitable with price drops and competition. That’s the bad news – the good news? Maybe with the new CSP Windows 10 thing Microsoft will include Surface as part of the program to those not already a Surface Authorized Distributor, or make Surface authorization available to every CSP Direct partner.

LinkedIN – Only Microsoft can spend over 26B for an acquisition and investors are still wondering what it is they bought; and more importantly, not hurt their quarterly earnings. Yeah, they can tie it in for Dynamics and Yammer/Teams with all those users. They also have a pretty impressive data list of users to sell additional collaboration products and services to. I guess the jury is still out on this.

Opinion – Microsoft recently announced a major change in their sales organization. Their sales teams that were focused on the enterprise need to focus more on solution type selling. A lot of organizations in the industry are going through the same transformation. It’s also not an easy thing to do. Time will tell.

I wrote an entire article without mentioning Amazon, they report earnings next week. It will be interesting to see how they compare to Microsoft and how much they grew year of year in comparison. Lots of analysis say Microsoft will surpass AWS as the king of the cloud. I still think Google is lurking in the background and might surprise some people as well.

What does all this mean for SPLA? In my humble opinion, I think Microsoft better be careful with the way they are handling their third-party hosters. Those numbers they threw out yesterday were great, but they can get even better.

Microsoft built a program for partners who have their own datacenters, relationships, and sales resources to promote Microsoft products and technology. There are close to 30,000 SPLA partners (rough estimate) that have datacenters spread throughout the globe. Nobody, can have the reach like your SPLA partners. Google and Amazon do not have 30,000 datacenters, why disrupt it? Don’t audit them, partner with them and help grow this business to build a true hybrid cloud ecosystem. The strategy should be their cloud – our cloud, and customers will thank you. Teaming with Walmart makes sense too. Say what!

The year 2017 has brought on A LOT of change for the hosting community. A hosting company used to be an organization that hosted Exchange – fast forward to today and a service provider takes on a whole new meaning. In this article, we will take a look at defining a service provider and how it applies to licensing. Let’s play a little game called “Do they qualify” Have a question? Email info@splalicensing.com

An organization that provides or extends litigation software (that they leased from the publisher) to law firms and other legal entities who are not wholly owned by the organization providing the solution. Does this organization qualify for SPLA?

Yes. If you are an avid reader of splalciensing.com, you probably read my article on EMR Software The same holds true for any software (not just EMR) that runs on Microsoft technology that you do not own, but lease from a third-party. Remember “AS” If you are providing software AS a service that’s hosted from your datacenter environment, SPLA must be part of the equation. Why does this solution qualify for SPLA?

#1 they don’t own the software they are hosting

#2 they do not own the organization(s) who are consuming (using) the software for their benefit.

An organization who sells a product on a website to external users – do they qualify for SPLA?

No. Although they are selling something to consumers via the internet, the software used to deploy the solution benefits the e-commerce company, not the end-user. Where SPLA does fit is if the web company decides to host a website on behalf of another organization. The web company would fall under the SPLA rules. Who benefits from the access is a key question to ask yourself. Second question – is the access used to run their business or my own?

An organization who provides SharePoint to end users to share information. Do they qualify?

No. Simply sharing information does not qualify. If the organization was hosting SharePoint on behalf of another organization, that’s SPLA.

A company hosts Exchange on behalf of another organization but does not charge for this access. Does this qualify for SPLA?

Yes. Microsoft doesn’t care how much money you make from the solution. The question remains – are you providing this “as a service” for a third-party?

A company decides to use AWS as their datacenter provider to host an application they use internally. Do they need SPLA?

No. In this example, you are the end-user. AWS has a SPLA to cover all infrastructure products they host on your behalf. If you were to use AWS as a datacenter provider to host SharePoint to your end customers employees; you would pay AWS for Windows and SQL and report on your SPLA SharePoint SAL licenses.

I have 25 Linux machines that I host for my customers. Do I need SPLA?

No. You have 25 Linux machines. If you had 24 Linux machines and 1 Windows VM, you would have to license the host machine to cover that Windows VM through SPLA.

My reseller told me I didn’t need SPLA because the access qualifies for Self-Hosted. The auditors told me it does not qualify. Why?

All software used to deploy the solution has to be self-hosted eligible. I bet you are running an application that does not qualify as part of your solution. This would be SPLA. Secondly, if you did not buy the software with software assurance, that is out of compliant.